The Sons of Our Fathers
by Trinity Archangel
Summary: Damian Wayne and Jon Kent prove to be very different men than their fathers. Damian doesn't have the responsibility of girding a superpower, so his askew principles have few consequences. But no one else can afford for Jon to be anything else but Superman. One-shot, Damian as Batman.


When Superman died, the Earth seemed take a collective breath. It was quite unbelievable that the impervious son of Krypton had been felled by grief. By his own design, he submitted to sorrow following a lethal acceptance that his wife Lois Lane had died. All at once he seemed to unravel and fall into a distracted chasm, barely any evidence of age morphing his features as his soul decayed. His shoulders hung a little forward, his interests waned, his influence dulled. It was the final straw after hoping for fruitless change in this world and in his adversaries, that Lois would die, albeit content, and for three years he kept this acknowledgment at bay until there were no more avenues of escape left in his mind. Save for his son, Jon, an independent man who seldom visited and shied away from his father's associations, he was alone.

His mind slipped first, his body submitted next, then finally, in a cradle of peace in the Metropolis he had created, his son opened his eyes one bright and mournful morning to find the hand he had cradled all the night before to be still in his own. He leaned toward the man before him, a shade older in appearance, mouth firmly set and ill content in his death. The base of his black pate was silver- gray, and a tear stain ran down the length of his perfectly etched face.

Jon Kent accepted that he could never hope to be a shadow of what his father was. While Superman was alive, no one minded that Jon had slipped off to assume his own mortal life. But at this unexpected death, while Jon stood alone and the threshold of his father's grave, he felt thousands of pairs of eyes glaring expectantly at him while he gazed maddeningly into the earth where his father lay.

His mind swam during the eulogy, cocooned in grief, nearly mad himself, mumbling his mind's own incantations.

"What now?"

His own voice startled him when his subconscious betrayed him and his thoughts became audible. His words had stumbled Jimmy Olsen's speech but Jimmy glanced over the interruption when he noticed Jon was neither here nor there, and continued again uninterrupted.

Now he sat in the graveyard, his hard and muscular figure hunched over his knees, peering through black framed glasses as the last of the news crew packed up to leave. Jon had keen, inert observational qualities of his mother Lois and a spirit that seldom quelled. Her restless obsessions he had adopted and her suspicious smile that revealed little more than it let on, but his features, his strength, his _power_ were his father's. He was the very image of the Superman, but little else. Jon Kent was his own man, with his own aspirations, and it didn't include the preservation of Earth. What he wanted was to head back on the first flight back to Jefferson Lab in Virginia where his father's influence couldn't be credited with his academic excellence.

A figure approached him from behind and set a heavy hand on his broad shoulder, sympathetic. He barely glanced up when the figure was sailing over the bench to settle in next to him, casually gliding his aviator sunglasses into his jet black hair to catch his eyes.

"It's about time this graveyard cleared up."

Damian Wayne had made only casual appearances in his life since he had met him behind mansion walls at Wayne Manor, as his father as Clark Kent spoke of concerns that only men of power faced under the cape to Bruce Wayne, a charming, generous charlatan. He knew him only before then as the broody and impatient Batman but there he was, very much a powerless man who spoke fearlessly to his father as though he couldn't rise up from the armchair he had sat in and break him in half between two fingers. He did not like Batman, he was polite to Bruce, and it was this common denominator that bonded Damian and Jon as boys.

Damian did not like his father either. He often rebelled against him, scoffed at his idealism, mocked his code of honor and forced his way into the cowl long before he was mentally prepared to be the Batman. As a man, he was an arrogant, hedonistic, ostentatious and a playboy like his father before him but with unbound indulgences. As the Batman, he was bellicose, unforgiving, largely disliked and half committed.

What could Damian Wayne know of Jon's loss? He had smirked quietly at his father's own funereal. Wayne Enterprises he left to the handling of Lucius Fox's daughter, Tam, while he visited every corner of the Earth, trying in vain to expire his inheritance. Coming back to Gotham to assume the role of Batman was unsurprising to Jon, who knew all Damian really wanted was his father's acceptance. Beneath the excess, he was a halfway decent man.

"I'm really sorry, Jon." For what it was worth, it was as genuine as it could have come from Damian. His arms folded across a well defined chest, revealing a glimpse of his prowess beneath his dark sport coat, and a not so subtle glossing of financial excess on his wrist.

Jon looked over him quickly. He hadn't changed. He didn't have to have superb reasoning to know the idling suits weren't with the news crew. Jon sat back on the bench, fingers knitted.

"What do I do now?" He asked.

Damian shrugged and spread his arms along the length of the bench. "Whatever the hell you want, Jon."

He expected that response.

"They look at me as if they expect me to rip open my shirt and take flight," he said forlornly.

"The people don't need saving. Alexa Luthor has proven to be none of the man her father was as President."

"What if they do?"

Damian shrugged again. "So save them, or don't."

"And the world? What if I can't?"

"That's what the JLA are for. And what do you mean, _can't?"_ He echoed, furrowing his brows. He leaned over unexcused and pulled the glasses off of Jon's downcast face. "You can see ten miles down the road and yet you play the part of the coy physicist. You practice restraining yourself so much that you actually believe you're normal." Damian regressed with a bitter air, tossing the glasses back into his lap.

Damian believed there had never been a time when Jon expressed his potential, but he hadn't been in his life when he purposed to do anything.

No one appreciated his unbound expressions.

"In any case, you're _not_ Superman. No one expects you to be. No one is asking you to save the world or even Metropolis."

Jon answered with a sigh. Damian continued.

"I'll _never_ be Bruce Wayne. People hate me for it. I'm not even a convincing Batman. But there's nothing stopping you from being everything your father was. Except yourself."

Damian did not speak again following his soliloquy; Jon did not offer him conversation. They sat together silently, Damian sprawled about the bench wagging his lapped foot contentedly, and Jon bowed over his knees with his fingers knitted, looking at everything and seeing nothing.

Damian remained in Metropolis for a week, dragging a reluctant Jon behind him most nights. Damian was unapologetically avaricious when it came to fame or infamy—as he had made the papers daily, his trysts and extravagance overshadowing the death of Superman until it had been totally eclipsed. Not for Jon at least, who was not a socialite or an exhibitionist. At Damian's often spur of the moment gatherings, he could not escape the boring subject matter that was his profession, and often people would glaze over and tune out mid theory of relativity, disappointed that the he wasn't as charismatic as he was handsome, only to erupt in a hopeful change of subject, often interrupting with _something _along the lines of his father. It was happening now.

"Oh. Couldn't your father read minds too?" The sinuous blonde in front of him hadn't even the courtesy to let him finish his sentence.

Jon tightened his lips, bruised by her rudeness. He mumbled an unenthused no. He watched her eyes dart back to him. She had been truly enamored with the gaggle of women encircling the theatrical Damian, sharing in the pitched cackling of his admirers. He was effortlessly entertaining. She feigned a quick smile for him and touched his hand lightly as she turned, excusing herself.

Jon set down his wine glass on the passing tray of the server and jammed his hands into the pockets of his Dockers. He felt so pretentious. Wine had no effect on him. He squeezed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, pushing his glasses up onto his forehead. That was something else. The glasses. He didn't need them. He set them in his shirt pocket and idled about for a few more minutes, feigning pleasure in orchestral music framing the lavish show of money before he took his leave.

Damian found him in his room, some hours later, as usual introverted and antisocial, contented to lay on his back and stare at the ceiling. Damian had a Gotham Times paper tucked under his arm and an exhausted expression painting his face. A thin cigarette clung to the corner of his lips, sending spiraling clouds upward. He pushed in the door with his foot as Jon sat up, swinging his legs to the floor.

"God above, Jon, was the party so insufferable?" He didn't care for an answer as he took a seat in the plush armchair at the foot of the bed, kicking off his John Lobb's carelessly and crossing his feet atop the foot of the bed. He snapped open the paper.

Jon answered with a dry smile. "Which girl was it?" He quizzed softly.

Damian seemed startled that his fornication was obvert, more so that the evidence may have ruined his attire more than the poor moral image it presented. "How could you tell?" He balked, glancing around at himself for a trace of evidence. Even if he had bothered not to skip a button redressing, or wash the glossy taint of lipstick from his neck, Jon could very clearly see the Brunette hair draped along his shoulder, smell the fragrance of her faded perfume and subtly, the euphoric pheromones of a satisfied rendezvous. Nevertheless, Damian settled with a devilish smirk.

"The Bolivian." He went back to his paper. An arm stretched out to his side and tapped a sprinkling of ashes onto the floor.

Jon scanned the paper in a pass of his eyes and had deftly consumed the entire back page in just that second.

"Don't you care that Gotham is unraveling in your absence?"

Damian shrugged. "I let the GCPD earn their salary at times."

"But crime has more than doubled since The Batman has been gone."

"I haven't been gone long," Damian responded from behind the paper.

Jon contended gently. "The back page says you've been gone for three months."

Damian folded the paper swiftly, scanning over the back page for the source of his information. There it was in size ten font, ellipses marking the continuation of the story on page two: "Crime Rages as the Batman Sabbatical Continues Into Month Three." Damian shot a disdainful glance at Jon. He was like a poorly socialized child at times. He had been in Metropolis almost a week, trying in vain to lighten the crushing shock of losing his father to frivolity, but Jon neither lamented or celebrated. He was stuck in this purgatory of impassivity. Nothing seemed to give rise to him. Damian gave up on the paper and left it behind in the chair, going over to the grand fourth wall of window space, a clean bird's eye view of the twinkling cityscape below. He passed through the rolling glass doors onto the sweeping terrace with Jon in tow, hands jammed into his pockets and eyes averted. A cool gust of wind blew back their thick locks, cleaning the view of their faces. Jon, in every way his father, Damian a diluted version of Bruce, perhaps even a hairsbreadth more handsome due to the exotic contribution of his Arabic mother, the ruthless assassin Talia Al Ghul. His complexion was olive, his hair held a perfect curl, especially when wet, with dark, mischievous eyes that became seductive almost at will. He had at one point envied the startlingly crisp, azure eyes of Jon, until he came to notice they were astonishingly empty at times.

He folded his arms and leaned over the railing, squinting into the wind at the manufactured twilight below.

"Have I done nothing but made you miserable?" Jon asked sincerely.

Miserable? Hardly. Jon found Damian and his antics vaguely amusing. He may have been _boring_ but if Damian was hoping for a friend in his sexcapades, he would have to look elsewhere. It wasn't so much that he was prudent, but took little pleasure in the fleeting indulgences of his friend.

Jon shook his head and shrugged. "I dunno."

Damian turned, resting his elbows on the railing. The thought of being twenty or more stories up from a penthouse balcony did not daunt him. In another life, in another city, he slung through the city like Tarzan on a fiber wire barely wider than a thread.

Damian looked him over for sincerity but found he could not read him at all. He nearly rolled his eyes. His response, almost coy, came out at face value. There was no inflection or snippet of expression that revealed deception. Maybe he was telling the truth. But it was maddening to hear that puerile line coming out of a six foot five man, shoulders as wide as a barge and hands to match. At the next pass of the wind, he parted his lips and let the remains of his cigarette carry with it.

"I know this sounds trite, but I want you to be happy. Do something that pleases you, despite what's expected of Superman's son."

Damian had barely lifted his eyes to Jon's face when he realized, with horror, that he was transcending through space, the balcony out of reach and gaining distance rapidly, a swell of wind tearing away beneath him as though trying in vain to slow him. His hands fanned desperately at his sides, knowing well he could not evolve wings to take him from this peril. There wasn't a gadget or accessory on him that could save him from exploding onto the approaching city street below. At this realization, he yelled out, looking up for Jon as his last hope but saw nothing but blurring lights and engulfing black. A moment before he passed the third story balcony, he was swept up abruptly, suspended under the arms by Jon flying above him laughing genuinely.

Damian gaped up at his face as he smoothly soared back up to the balcony from which he'd fallen, disturbed by the purest, authentic joy on his friend's face. Had he not been rehearsed by his father to remain stoic in the face of any threat, he would have fainted away. Another moment and he was firmly set on the terrace, Jon alighting softly beside him, his laughter settling. Damian whisked around, stunned but composed. "_What_ happened?"

Jon, hands in his pockets again, shrugged, tossing a vine of hair from his eyes. "I pushed you."

That's right. He remembered now feeling the brush of his swift moving hand against his shoulder. At this, Damian didn't hide his shock. "You _pushed_ me? What the hell for, Jon?"

Jon had subsided to a wide smile now. "It _pleased _me." He made light of his anxiety by knocking his arm jovially. Damian was so unraveled it nearly threw him from his feet. He didn't think it was funny. He brushed his hair back with his hands and started for the sliding glass doors to go back inside. He drew it back so harshly it almost came off the track. Jon was at his heels.

"Don't be angry, Damian. It was a laugh at your expense. You know I wouldn't have let you fall."

Damian stopped to scoop up his shoes on the way out, considering this truth. Yeah, he would have. He did. But Jon had a sick sense of humor totally inconsistent with the character he presented. It was surprising, to say the least. He responded after a deep, sobering sigh.

"See you tomorrow, Jon." He waved to him from over his shoulder and padded out into the hallway, shoes in hand. Jon walked him to the door, chuckling softly, and closed him out. That was almost as satisfying as laying on his back in bed, staring up through the ceiling at the couple upstairs, assuming their tryst was unaccompanied by a downstairs voyeur who could see through walls.

When the couple upstairs ended their romp, the x-ray vision clouded over by sheer will of mind until the clarity of a disrupted bedroom scene was shrouded by a trey ceiling and soft inlay lights. Then he spent his next waking moments listening for a conversation worth paying attention to. To Jon, it was like selecting a radio station. Damian liked to pretend that he seldom gave second thoughts about the wellbeing of Gotham, but he was just down the hall, on the phone with Barbara Gordon, checking in. When he tired of listening to the trivial conversations of his neighbors, he reflected.

Clark Kent, his father, was dead.

He reflected on when they used to race across the empty plains of Smallville when he was a boy, leaving only gusts of wind to mark their passing. He smiled. Growing up with Superman as his father was simultaneously the best and worse bestowing of his life. What his mother missed in a blink, his father saw and corrected. What his mother thought was mischievous, his father did not appreciate. Often times, when he dared to go beyond harmless misdeeds, he could feel the disapproving scorn of his father, never afar off, with his arms folded and a knowing look shaming him into submission. His father approached parenting diplomatically, and reproached him only with gentle advice and disappointing looks. When he used his gifts advantageously, no matter how craftily constructed, his father always _knew._

"_Just because you can, should you?" His father asked, at one of the many private conversations he had had with him in his youth, a courtesy to save his mother the headache. Whatever he had done, he had as usual, not gotten away with it. _

_Jon's eyes were stapled to his dirty sneakers, face reddening with anger. How did he know? How did he always know? The crimson tinge, he knew, his father would interpret as shame. But in his silence he wasn't contemplating what he'd done, but how to do it better._

"_Jon?" _

_His shoulders edged up then depressed rapidly._

_A gentle hand glided up his arm and cupped his shoulder. When he finally glanced up to trace the long and brawny arm to the smiling face that housed a pair of benevolent blue eyes, already radiant with forgiveness, he felt his own eyes welling with tears. He hated most when he looked at him directly, though he smiled, his eyes were too telling. Behind those orbs always there was a glimmer of suspicion, as though he had caught wind of a spiteful nature he saw dormant in his own son. His gentleness he used to dissuade; though he was the only being in the universe who could match and surpass him, who could force him to relent, he chose to sway him with kindness._

_With a blink, the tears rolled from his eyes. "I don't know, dad," he sobbed. _

_Another moment and he was crushed in the crook of his father's arm, stumped by a moral conundrum. He felt a quick and comforting kiss planted on his head. He never knew the answer to that question. _

_Jon always felt suppressed. He walked when he should have flown. He struggled when he should have conquered. He feigned patience, humility and tolerance. _

_Now that he was gone, who was there to suppress him? His father wept on his deathbed, for once the familiar echo of suspicion in his eyes giving way to worry as he stared at him until his eyes shut. He had only ever guessed at what he was._

_The only other person who seemed to share his father's sentiments, was Bruce Wayne. Every cut of his eyes was a dissection._

"Do you think your father would have been proud of you?"

Damian glanced up at the reflection over his shoulder. Jon was standing a few paces behind him at the threshold of the bathroom, hands burrowed in the pockets of his denims, a suede sport coat over an un-tucked white button down. He stared expectantly at him through a wire framed pair of glasses.

Damian cocked a brow. "Who, Bruce?"

He never called his father anything but. He slipped the fabric of his thin, black necktie through the loop he had made and eased back from the mirror to admire himself.

He turned to face him, a half smile flitting across his lips. "Who cares?" His attempt at apathy was unconvincing. He was more preoccupied with Jon in his private suite, though he hid his surprise and displeasure well. There would be little sense in chiding a man who couldn't seem to fathom social norms. When had he entered his room? How long had he been standing there? It seemed he almost phased in through the walls, disturbing of nothing save for Damian, covertly annoyed by his friend's lack of propriety.

Damian breezed past him and went for the pair of cufflinks at his bedside table, adorning his sleeves as he went for the door expecting Jon to be in tow. Instead, he lingered.

"I thought about it all last night," Jon added. Damian waited, fingers wrapped around the golden lever, ready to exit. He stood attentively, anticipating a continuation but when Jon said no more, ending without dénouement, Damian sought to derail what he expected to be a forthcoming soliloquy of his comparable inadequacy. He may not have said anything, but his downcast eyes spoke volumes of a self defeating night. Damian ushered him out with a gesture but had no comforting words for him. It did not stop him from turning the question over and over in his mind.

No, Bruce would not have been proud of him. He respected his father to a degree but he could hardly imagine living under the judgmental scrutiny of a savant who had perfected all physical limits and nearly every avenue of academia, existing dually as Bruce Wayne and The Batman without his mind failing to recognize the difference, if any, without any superpowers whatsoever despite perhaps the sharp and astute mind of a detective that did not decay as his body did. As a boy, it was torturous. As a man it would have driven him to _madness_.

Still, he had not bared the burden of being Superman's son, and no one, save for a small circle back in Gotham, expected or _wanted_ him to don the cowl. But Jon and everyone in Metropolis hereafter, would fall under the shadow of a sixty foot stature of Superman presently being unveiled in Metropolis Square amidst an impatient crowd, bearing the long winded speeches of government officials. The statue had been in the making for years but had been completed in a timely coincidence shortly before Superman's death.

Damian, had of course done what was expected of a socialite, sitting amidst a crowd of the upper crust, privy to reserved seating. Though the seat next to him was for Jon Kent, it held the featherweight frame of a doe eyed admirer, more taken with him than the ceremony. Damian seldom blessed her distracted ramblings with little more than polite nodding all the while he had fixed his eyes to the rear of the crowd where his disturbed friend was doing a fair bit of pacing.

It had started up shortly after the elevating speeches about his father had commenced and rather than being honored, appreciative, he became annoyed. Impatient. The sideways looks he garnered from those about him ushered him outside the innumerable crowd of flashing cameras, news prompters and recording cell phones.

The true Jon Kent, Damian had learned all that week, was surfacing. With some degree of restraint, he had revealed himself to Damian. Jon was not socially inept, though he may have led many to believe his introverted disassociations were coy in nature, Damian saw an opportunist, lurking about the corners seeing only what he wanted to see at the expense of others; reacting to afar off conversations he should not have been privy to, and of course, disregarding the privacy of others.

Jon chose to skirt society simply to go unnoticed. He had left Metropolis to escape the direct control of his father, the one man who could tame a mildly perverse nature he had only suspected into remission. The averted eyes hid what Damian had caught in glimpses only.

He arose with the crowd, shielding his eyes from the late morning sun, and watched as the veil slithered from the enormous monument with reverent ease along the smooth stone surface of the Kryptonian. As the drapery piled at the statue base, the crowd flocked and applauded in awe. Sixty feet of a near perfect likeness, capturing the confidant and authoritative glare of the city's savior, arms folded patiently, with only the tug of a distant smile softening the chiseled features of his face. His cape gathered beneath his levitating feet, serving as an anchor for the man of stone. A classic pose with an uncanny likeness, comforting to all but Jon, bathed in the shadow of the statue.

For once, Jon could gaze into the face of his father and meet his eyes, free of the damning suspicion that paralyzed his immoral fantasies; eyes that did not shield a hope that he would not find an adversary in his son; eyes without faint traces of regret and disappointment.

Now the stone eyes held no doubts, and the confidence therein issued only challenge.

Damian saw the aura of red gleaming from his friend's eyes long before the beam even fired.

"Jon, no!"

With the exclamation, the laser shot forth from the inexperienced Jon, rusty and unaccustomed to girding his own abilities. It struck the statue's eyes dead on, raining down pebbly debris on the gasping crowd. The intensity of the blast seemed to surprise even Jon, who slapped a hand over his eyes to seal the laser. Damian was already tearing through the crowd to get to him. When he took down his hands, tears were staining his cheeks, and the ill-suited son of Superman shot toward the sky in a frightening red blast, streaking toward the heart of the city.

Damian was tearing through the hotel lobby with a tail of confused press nipping at his heels. Outside, the busy street front was cluttered with people standing in a pile of shattered glass and pointing up toward the penthouse suites. Jon had spiraled in through the glass a few minutes ago. The cab Damian had run out from didn't even bother to demand a fare as he raced through the traffic on foot.

He slid in through the barely parted slither of the closing elevator doors and immediately pressed the doors closed, sealing out the prying eyes of the paparazzi. He had to throw his shoulder into the door to enter Jon's room where a curious crowd had gathered. He shut them out abruptly and rounded the recently made King sized bed in the centre of the room where the ragged hole in the balcony doors poured shards of glass onto the carpeting, leading to the unscathed Jon, on the floor, pressed up against the bedside.

Damian seized him by the shoulders. "Are you alright?" He didn't know why his eyes were desperate as they swept over his friend for injuries he knew would not be there.

"I'm fine," Came the certain reply. Jon looked up at him with a troubled smile. "I just don't know what to do with this liberation."

Damian, on bended knee, dropped his shoulders and offered his friend a hand to rise that he did not need. Jon got up without assistance.

"What do you mean?"

Jon gazed blankly at him. "The only person that could stop me is dead."

Damian felt the situation escalating long before it did. Intuition, intrinsic or acquired, had told him so. The reserved Jon Kent he had always known had melted away and before him now stood tyranny. The cell door had opened the moment Superman died, but only now did the criminal realize he had had freedom.

Still, he dared to ask the next question. "Stop you from _what?" _

"_Anything_." The smirk that followed was unsettling.

"Jon! You aren't making any sense!"

Damian reached out and fearlessly latched onto the ankle of his departing friend, a meager attempt to do the impossible: anchor him. He could only stall him. He soon found himself dragging along attached to his foot. He had to duck through the opening in the glass. He could feel his clothes snagging on the shards.

"Your father worked too hard to build this city into what it is. Don't do this. You're not well, Jon." Before he knew it, he was dangling from the leg that he now clutched from necessity, the street below a barely decipherable speck of colours. He could hardly see the resolved face of his disturbed friend against the back drop of the sun.

"Don't stand against me, Damian."

Damian swung his other hand up and grabbed a fistful of jeans at his calf. "I'm appealing to you as your _friend._"

At this, Jon reached down and gathered the lapels of Damian's shirt, lifting him easily from his foot like a kitten by its scruff. By his strength, he was near weightless. He brought him up to his face.

"Then why are you wearing the Batsuit under your shirt?"

For that, Damian had no answer. The smoldering red orbs marked the absence of Jon Kent. He couldn't appeal to a man that wasn't there.

"For God's sake, Jon!"

Unexpectedly, Damian found himself dismissed. There was no conscious when Jon uncurled his iron like fingers and let him slip out from his grasp. He was dropping again, plummeting toward earth—but he didn't count on a rescue. If Damian inherited anything from his detective father, it was distrust. Bruce softened this truth by treating his suspicions as a sort of insurance. The batsuit under his clothes was just that.

At his utility belt he found the pronged fiber wire, a thin, hardly reliable but good enough stand in to ease his descent. It shot out from his waist and gripped the nearest building side firmly, drawing Damian into the brick siding forcefully. He braced the wall with his feet and absorbed most of the impact before finding the siding and digging his fingers into the quarter inch brick for traction. He slipped anyhow, dropped the twenty feet the wire allowed and paused only momentarily before detaching from the wall under his weight. The last twenty feet Damian accepted with the ease of a free runner and found himself breathless in the alley way, tearing away his clothes.

He had barely slipped the cowl over his head when the Batmobile eased behind him in prompt response to his distress signal. It was the only thing fast enough to keep Jon in sight.

Jon was a disastrous superhuman. Inexperience plagued his flight. He would unexpectedly plummet and rise again, he couldn't keep a steady pace and the beams that burst from his eyes flickered like a dying flashlight. Persistence and determination kept him afloat through his learning curve; if nothing else he would crumble the statue of his father. If there was a shred of remorse for dropping Damian, it was no match for an unbound id, consuming every source of consideration like a raging fire.

When he was but a blink from the park, he dropped to the street, stunning his audience, for no other reason but to savour the anticipation of destroying the representation of the man who suppressed him. He had heard the squealing tires approaching as he neared the intersection, but for a man who feared nothing, he lacked the ability to perceive threat. He had barely taken a step when the Batmobile raged from his right side and collided with him with enough force to tear him from the ground. It was unexpected and surprising if nothing else, and when he found himself pinned between the Batmobile and the storefront siding of a curbside eatery, he raised his eyes to meet Damian's own, two slits beneath the cowl. Jon was unscathed.

"Damian, you ass," he scolded.

When Damian saw Jon reaching down toward his fender, he knew in an instant that he was going to flip the car. As the Batman, he had to be one step ahead of the game. He had already hit the ejector button when Jon rolled the car away end on end as though it were a toy. He dropped pointedly in front of him with his cape billowing out like a parachute to soften his decent.

"Don't do this," Damian warned again, his voice alive with clarity and authority. He made no attempt to shield his voice.

Jon spoke softly when he called him a "Coward."

Damian didn't respond to his taunt.

"Who are you really? The apathetic playboy or the valiant hero? Which part are you playing?_" _

"_You're_ the one playing a part, Jon. I've been your friend for too long to let you submit to this."

"Batman is not my friend."

"Which part me of did you try to kill? Batman? Or Damian?"

The question stalled Jon for a moment. A look of query shadowed his features. He could not segregate the two. He did not have to answer to Damian. He didn't have to answer to _anyone. _He would launch him into space this time. Once the decision had been made the very thought of malice morphed his expression once again. It was this subtlety that put Damian at the ready. Jon came upon him, and with one sweep he scooped him up and drew him back to send him out into orbit. When Jon released him, Damian had barely cleared the nearest rooftop when the grappling gun attached a line to the building and drew him back in front of Jon under the same speed. He was surprised to see Damian soaring toward him instead.

The impact of his feet on his chest didn't have an effect on Jon, but Damian used him as a launching pad to flip himself into the air. Two smoke bombs erupted and cocooned them in a blinding haze. In a single inhale Jon could clear the air. The futility of Damian's gadgetry could only buy him time.

That was all Damian wanted. A split second. A glitch in time. It was all he needed to _act._ The brain can make over twenty billion calculations per second. Batman made each one count. When Superman gave his father the Kryptonite ring _in case_—Damian thought it was folly. Now he was sliding it over his finger for the very reason Superman gave it to the Batman. He wasn't even sure if it would work against Jon. But he didn't give another thought to doubt when he drove his fist up and under his chin.

Either his fist would shatter on impact or he would damn near knock off Jon's head. The latter happened. For the first time _ever_, he was able to move Jon. He wasn't impervious.

Jon plummeted backward like a chopped tree with Damian's cape entangled in his hand. He had seen him charging toward him through the smoke and managed to grab a hold of him before his teeth collided and threw him back. Damian had all but knocked him out and all at once made him feel vulnerable and exhausted.

_The kryptonite ring._ Jon didn't have to see it to know it was there.

Damian fell upon him with fist raised for a second blow when a desperate beam shot out of his eyes and would have gone clear through his head had not the kryptonite done its job. The nanotechnology in Damian's cowl instantly went berserk. It took him a moment to realize he hadn't gone blind and in an act of desperation, drew off his cowl.

Jon took the opportunity to roll away. He could barely lift his own weight to get afoot. He didn't know how far the he had to be to invalidate the effects of the Kryptonite ring. He tried to spring up into the air but found himself heavily grounded. So he took to his hands and knees and crawled until he could stand. Then he stumbled until he could walk. When he felt the grip of the krypotnite's nullifying effects slipping with every step forward, he leapt up into the air good thirty feet, turned and faced Damian.

Another pointed beam shot from his eyes and seared Damian's hand. He drew back reflexively and as he did so the kryptonite ring, which Jon had precisely aimed for, disappeared from his hand. In a blink Jon swooped down and encircled Damian in his arms, willing to crush him but the proximity of the splintered kryptonite sucked his power immediately, and he dropped to his knees, dragging his fingers along Damian's suit.

Two knees in the chest felled him, and Damian tossed him aside with some ease, though the initial contact of Jon's constricting arms had rendered him momentarily numb. Wailing police sirens sounded in the distance. The face Damian had exposed was hardly his own: the cowl itself was layered, with the inner layer a marring wig of blonde hair and darkening pigment smeared across his eyes in a Zorro like mask. It was a badly executed cover that served its' purpose: simply to place skepticism into the throng of disturbed witnesses, stunned to inaction. When he slipped the cowl back over his cover, the trickery of internal technology shaded his brown eyes the lustrous blue of his father, though his sight was now limited to his biological ability. Jon's blast had simply reduced his options.

Jon staggered up from the street, teeth grinding with determination. The kryptonite ring was mere dust. He could feel his strength returning. He stumbled to a streetlamp, preparing to burn that smug Damian to dust when his power recharged. He would spear him with the streetlamp. He would crush him between his hands and dust his ashes into Metropolis. He only willed to do it. His body leaned against the supporting streetlight, liable to collapse at any moment. He stared with disdain at Damian, posed at the ready with his cape in its majesty reared behind him.

"I have to stop you, Jon." He said as flatly as he could without a waiver of regret in his voice for Jon to decipher. He had delivered it expertly, without remorse, with the disassociation of an unacquainted stranger merely doing his duty-in cowl and cape-but the tones of familiarity echoed deep within him. Jon had been his friend. But Damian was not his father. Mercy and forgiveness often retreated from his forethought. It would be with a heavy heart that he would kill Jon Kent.

With the kryptonite ring destroyed, he resorted to play Jon's strengths against him. Jon once confided in him that the resonant tone of the Earth could send him into a trance. If he detected frequencies that low, a high pitch would split his skull in half. The Batmobile, prone, immobile, but far from useless, was equipped to accommodate Damian as such. With a button press, the bats his father so often signaled for flair or for purpose made no migration to the area. With the frequency amplified, the only one able to hear the sound was Jon. He at first made no reaction but when the sound waves crashed into him it pierced his ears like an ice pick. He dove to the ground in great theatrics, grinding his teeth and sucking his palms to his ears in a futile attempt to stifle the sound.

The confused spectators looked to Damian who stood unaffected before the writing superman. A trickle of blood seeped out from under his hands. He submitted to a fetal curl, howling insensibly as the equally confused arriving task force closed in on the men. By the time Damian cut the transmission, Jon was a deaf imbecile, powerless in the custody of the Metropolis Police Department, and the Batman was gone with the next gust of wind.

"Is this really you?"

Before he could look up at the owner of the voice, a newspaper breezed past him and settled squarely on the crème ledge that ran the length of the double sided glass that separated him, Damian Wayne, from the man he came to see. Damian had had the paper thrust at him several times over the last few weeks, always with the same headline: _DAMIAN WAYNE THE BATMAN?_

He had learned to address his accusers with languid dismissal. He barely gave the paper a glance before he took it up and offered it to his company again, an expectant security guard armed with a militia of rebuttal should Damian deny the claim.

"If you wish to believe me a disheveled Gwynplaine moonlighting as a vigilante, then so be it. I accept the accusation. In fact, I wish it were true. The Batman can't have a more tiring life than Damian Wayne," He said with a yawn, folding his arms across his chest and lapping his foot across his knee.

The security guard's eyes beaded with petulance. "Half of Metropolis saw him drop you from the clouds!"

"Yes, hawkeyed Metropolis saw my figure falling from the sky, and yet, none had the talents to discover my dead body in the street. If anyone bothered to look, they would have found me fainted away in the penthouse suite."

"Humph. _He_ certainly believes you're the Batman." The security guard pointed to a large figure supported between two armed guards making their way toward him on the other side of the glass.

Damian spun casually in his chair to face the guard. "The burden of proof lies on the one making the claim and Jon Kent is a sick man." He faced the glass again under the same speed. "Please leave. I didn't pay for spectators."

The moment the door slammed Jon Kent was seated before him. The power and influence of Damian Wayne had purchased a private block of time with his friend. The guards had left them. What could Jon do? The bead of kryptonite implanted at the base of his skull left him as potent as the next man. Behind the thick forest of a black beard and eyes shaded by a shag of hair, the dormant hate in Jon Kent began to surface.

It emanated from him like a mist, dampening the ambiance. Damian could feel his spirit entangling him. "I'll be brief," he started.

Jon did not sever his glare.

"I didn't wish this for you, Jon. Have I made for myself a lifelong enemy of the man you've let yourself become?"

Jon's lips had formed a tight seal amidst the tangle of hair on his face. The longer Damian sat there patiently, as though the growing period of silence would end soon with Jon's response, the darker Jon's mood became.

When Jon did finally speak, his voice was surprisingly composed, given that his clenched fists and sloping glare warranted different expectations. "Do you intend to imprison other men of power?"

Damian sighed. "This is not what our fathers would have wanted. It's not what I want."

Jon's eyes fell downcast. But he was not affected by Damian's words. "Curse you, Damian Wayne. May you be your own undoing."

Damian shook his head softly. "Odd. I wish nothing but the best for you."

Jon flared up angrily, his contempt finally coming to a boil. "I will outlast you!" He exclaimed, smashing his fists onto the Plexiglas separator. It quivered like a leaf under the assault. "I will break you in two halves." He lifted his arms and held his hands level, cufflinks suspended between them. "Batman in one hand and Damian in the other. Everything you love, you will lose. I will make sure of it. You will stumble through this life!"

"I am _not_ my father!" Damian interrupted, rising in par with Jon.

The admission, which had always been obvious, had an eerily satisfactory effect on Jon. Damian, with his pale ethics and oscillating theories of justice, pretended to be the very man he could hardly stand beneath the cowl. But his admission threatened permanent consequence. It shed light on a character vastly different than the man who came before him. With very little qualm, each would destroy the other, Damian if need be and Jon because he could.

"Nor am I."

Jon's spreading smirk melted away Damian's stoicism. Damian was mirroring his expression, though feigned.

"See you, Jon," he said in part, turning away in flair when he could stand no longer the face off with Jon. It was boring. Jon had an eternity to outlast him.

Jon raised his hands to his turned back and hooked his thumbs beneath the cufflinks. With a decisive outward thrust of his wrists, the links broke apart with relative ease.

"Soon," he murmured before sinking into the chair he had risen from. It was exhausting resisting the kryptonite.


End file.
